Managing Up and Getting Visible: Making Sure the Work, and the Judgment Behind It, Actually Gets Seen
DAY 1 | Your Manager Knows Less About Your Work Than You Think
A manager with six direct reports has roughly forty minutes a week to spend on each one, once their own meetings, their own deliverables, and everyone else's fires are subtracted from a normal working week. Forty minutes is not enough time to notice the stakeholder relationship you quietly rebuilt, the requirements gap you caught before it became a costly rebuild, or the calm judgment call that kept a project from going sideways in a meeting they were not even in. I assumed for years that my manager saw more of my actual work than she did. She didn't, not because she failed to care, but because she was managing five other people's version of exactly the same problem, at exactly the same time.
The Awareness Gap
This is the starting point for the entire week. A manager's attention is a fixed resource, split across every person reporting to them, and the split almost never favours quiet, well-handled work over visible, noisy problems. A fire that needs putting out gets attention by default. A process quietly improved, a stakeholder quietly managed, a risk quietly avoided, none of that generates a signal loud enough to reach a manager's limited attention on its own.
This is not a character flaw in managers. It is the mathematics of divided attention applied to a real job. The mistake most business analysts make is treating this gap as something to feel resentful about, when it is actually just an information problem, the same shape of problem covered in the Difficult Stakeholders series. Nobody in that series was expected to read a stakeholder's mind. The whole method was surfacing what needed to be known, deliberately, rather than waiting for it to be noticed.
Most analysts, especially earlier in their career, have absorbed an unspoken rule that good work should speak for itself, and that pointing to your own contribution too directly reads as boastful or insecure. That rule sounds humble and virtuous, and it quietly costs people promotions, stretch assignments, and the kind of trust that gets you handed the next hard problem instead of someone else.
The honest reframe is this: managing up is not bragging; it is reporting. A well-run project reports status regularly, not because the sponsor doubts the team, but because visibility is how trust gets built and maintained over time. Your own work deserves the same discipline. Silently doing excellent work and hoping it gets noticed is not humility; it is an unmanaged risk, the same as shipping a feature with no monitoring and hoping nothing breaks.
What actually closes the gap, and what does not
Closing the Awareness Gap does not mean turning every status update into a highlight reel. It means being deliberate about three specific moments where visibility genuinely changes an outcome, rather than mentioning everything you do all the time, which reads as noise rather than signal.
When you catch a problem before it becomes visible to anyone else. This is the single most undervalued form of good work, because by definition, if you catch it early enough, nobody else ever sees the disaster that didn't happen.
When you make a judgment call under ambiguity that could have gone differently. This is exactly the kind of decision the Certifications series argued no exam can test, and it is precisely the kind of decision a manager needs visibility into to trust you with bigger ones.
When a relationship with a difficult stakeholder shifts because of something you specifically did. Managers rarely see the day-to-day texture of stakeholder management, only the eventual outcome, and connecting the outcome back to the specific move you made is often the single highest value thing you can surface.
A short version of what this looks like
CLOSING THE GAP IN ONE LINE, NOT A HIGHLIGHT REEL You: Quick flag before our one to one, wanted you to have context rather than surprise you later. I caught an issue with the approval workflow spec before it went to development; it would have meant a rebuild two sprints in. Fixed it in the requirements review; no impact to timeline, just wanted it on your radar. |
That is the entire shape of it. No performance, no exaggeration, just a specific fact your manager genuinely did not have and genuinely needed, delivered in a way that respects their limited time rather than demanding a reaction from them.
It is worth being concrete about the actual cost of leaving the Awareness Gap unaddressed, because the cost rarely shows up as a single dramatic moment. It shows up quietly, over months, in the form of who gets picked for the next stretch assignment, whose name comes up first when a client asks for a strong analyst, and whose annual review reads as generically positive rather than specifically compelling. None of those moments announce themselves as consequences of the gap. They simply reflect whatever picture of you happened to be sitting in your manager's head at the time, built from whatever forty minutes a week let them see. I have watched this play out personally and with analysts who were, by any honest measure, better at the actual work than the peers who kept getting picked ahead of them. The difference was never competence. It was that the picked analyst's manager had a rich, specific, up to date sense of what they had actually done, and the passed-over analyst's manager was still working from an impression formed months earlier, quietly going stale with every week that passed unreported.
This week's arc
Tomorrow builds out a simple structure for exactly what to surface and how often, so this does not become guesswork every week.
Wednesday is a quick reference framework for the specific moments worth flagging.
Thursday covers the harder version of this, managing up when the news is not good.
Friday closes with how visibility inside your organisation and visibility outside it, the brand work covered a few weeks ago, reinforce each other rather than competing for the same energy.
Go out and be successful.
Oluwatosin Ogunkoya | Flotog BA Insights | www.flotogbainsights.com
TOMORROW
The Weekly Visibility Habit - A simple, low-effort structure for staying on your manager's radar without turning into a self-promotion machine.
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